Category: The Dish

The Person Behind The Poet

by Dish Staff

Dylan Thomas reads his poem “Lament”:

Rowan Williams appreciates that Hilly Janes’ The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas rises above the “element of caricature” so common in depictions of the poet:

For so many male readers, [Thomas] is the quintessential poet of adolescence. How many of us were convinced on reading him that this was what poetry was really like, heady, incantatory, obsessively sensual? How many proceeded to write terrible imitations of him in the back of school notebooks? That is what people wince over: the young Dylan, with his off-the-peg Bohemianism, his obscure, symbolically coded resentments, his wild and frustrated sexuality, can look, to the literary (male) adult, like the fearful caricature of a half-forgotten self. …

Which is where Hilly Janes’s book comes as a welcome refreshment. No one is likely to publish a biography of Thomas demonstrating that he was a monogamous and placid soul who could hold his drink and manage his money. But Janes simply sets him in the context of a group of variously gifted Welsh friends and gives some sense of how and why – exasperating as he undoubtedly was – he retained their love and (intermittently) tolerance. The remarkable circle that met in Swansea’s Kardomah Café in the late 1930s was in no sense an echo chamber for Thomas’s ego. These men – Fred Janes (as Alfred was known to family and friends), Daniel Jones, Vernon Watkins, among others – were deeply serious artists, prolific, thoughtful, and self-critical. … In other words, here is Dylan Thomas in conversation with those he thought of as peers.

A Future Without Fear

by Dish Staff

Surveying the last decade’s plethora of dystopian sci-fi narratives, Michael Solana urges writers to chill out and embrace tech as an ally rather than enemy:

Certainly dystopia has appeared in science fiction from the genre’s inception, but the past decade has observed an unprecedented rise in its authorship. Once a literary niche within a niche, mankind is now destroyed with clockwork regularity by nuclear weapons, computers gone rogue, nanotechnology, and man-made viruses in the pages of what was once our true north; we have plague and we have zombies and we have zombie plague. Ever more disturbing than the critique of technology in these stories is the casual assault on the nature of Man himself. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was people walking through a black and white hellscape eating each other for 287 pages and it won the Pulitzer. Oprah loved it. Where the ethos of punk is rooted in its subversion of the mainstream, famed cyberpunk William Gibson’s Neuromancer is no longer the flagbearer of gritty, edgy, counter-cultural fiction; ‘life will suck and then we’ll die’ is now a truism, and we have thousands of authors prophesying our doom with attitude….

Our fears are demons in our fiction placing our utopia at risk, but we must not run from them. We must stand up and defeat them. Artificial intelligence, longevity therapy, biotechnology, nuclear energy — it is in our power to create a brilliant world, but we must tell ourselves a story where our tools empower us to do it. To every young writer out there obsessed with genre, consider our slowly coalescing counterculture, and wonder what side of this you’re standing on. Luddites have challenged progress at every crux point in human history. The only thing new is now they’re in vogue, and all our icons are iconoclasts. So it follows here that optimism is the new subversion. It’s daring to care. The time is fit for us to dream again.

 

Face Of The Day

by Dish Staff

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For her series Male Sport, Sophie Kirchner photographed female players of traditionally “masculine” sports like water polo, ice hockey and rugby:

Kirchner photographs her subjects right after a game. The women’s pupils are wide open, the adrenaline is still pumping dramatically in their blood. The images seem to cater to expected clichés. But one should be careful, because the photographer’s intention is exactly the opposite. These are portraits of athletes who love their sport and play it with passion. She is not working with a specious emancipatory agenda and she does not want to simply provoke. Her work is all about showing people who do what they love. Nothing more, but also nothing less. With her expressive portraits she simply points out that these women are not marginal, but that society is marginalizing them.

See more of her work here.

(Hat tip: iGNANT)

Quote For The Day

by Dish Staff

“What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable… It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly…. whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent.

That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us,” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

(Hat tip: Sage Mehta)

A Poet Gets The James Franco Treatment

by Dish Staff

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In May, we featured the poetry of Spencer Reece, who worked at Brooks Brothers clothing store for nearly a decade before his first collection of poems won The Bakeless Prize and subsequently was published as The Clerk’s Tale. The title poem from that volume begins this way:

I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier,
selling suits to men I call “Sir.”
These men are muscled, groomed and cropped–
with wives and families that grow exponentially.
Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties,
of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,
of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars,
of foulards, neats, and internationals,
of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.
I often wear a blue pin-striped suit.
My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.

James Franco recently released a short film, seen above, that’s based on the poem. In an interview about the project, Franco reveals what he was trying to convey:

Despite this lack of explicit dramatic action, there is a deep despair and intensity underneath the surface of the poem.

But it is also difficult to trace that effect down to any single line—it’s more of a cumulative effect. That’s what I wanted to achieve in the film: a seemingly mundane atmosphere that will accumulate into a sense of weight and depth.

As far as the look of the film, I was very influenced by the cover of Spencer’s book, which is a Sergeant painting of a young man. I thought that it had the right qualities of stasis, sorrow, and depth. I looked to the Dardenne brothers for their fluid shooting and blocking style, although I eventually broke this up by using a very powerful zoom lens. In the opening scene, I played out a full scene of the Clerk fitting a customer. This scene was inspired by the section of the poem that describes the interaction with the straight and married customers. I didn’t want the dialogue to address these issues too directly—instead I wanted to feel the tension through behavior and shot composition.

All that happens in the scene is a man buys a suit, but the shifting focus and size of the frame makes it feel like something bigger is happening. The fluidness of the dolly combined with the rough feeling of the zooms and the shifting focus contrast and blend with each other in the same way that I wanted the material and staid surface to contrast with the depth of the character’s feelings.

A Zoolander Award? Ctd

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

So many contenders for the Zoolander Award for fashion absurdity!

One reader nominates “The Kanye West $120 plain white t-shirt. Not absurd for the look but for the price and claiming it is somehow ‘fashion’. Not sure there is a better example of how much of a con the industry can be at times.”

This has potential. The only problem is the one the reader notes, namely that the shirt itself is inoffensive:

https://twitter.com/WayUpHere/status/361213679905157120

Another reader nominates some boat shoes that look as if oil – specifically, BP oil – had spilled on them. This does visually prefigure the mud shoe, but because the proceeds apparently went to charity, it seems somehow wrong to give it the Award. And yet, boat shoes (said as someone who does, in fact, own a pair). The preppy-filthy combination does have a whiff of Derelicte about it.

But I think we have our winner:

From a swanky lingerie shop in NY:

mickey-mouse-ears

Because we all need $525 Mickey Mouse ears.  Because they’re sexy? Ummm…

What did it for me was the e-commerce site’s product description:

Fantasy-inspired couture headpieces made by hand in New York City by milliner Heather Huey. Custom sizing available upon request.

  • Hand-wrapped vinyl wire headband
  • Vinyl covered fur felt mouse ears
  • One size

“Vinyl covered fur felt mouse ears,” for $525. Yes.

From Pulp To Proust?

by Dish Staff

Does genre fiction act as a gateway to the hard stuff, to Woolf and Nabokov? Tim Parks challenges the conventional wisdom behind the “‘I-don’t-mind-people-reading-Twilight-because-it could-lead-to-higher-things’ platitude”:

[W]hy do the right-thinking intellectuals continue to insist on this idea, even encouraging their children to read anything rather than nothing, as if the very act of reading was itself a virtue? …

What no one wants to accept—and no doubt there is an element of class prejudice at work here too—is that there are many ways to live a full, responsible, and even wise life that do not pass through reading literary fiction. And that consequently those of us who do pursue this habit, who feel that it enriches and illuminates us, are not in possession of an essential tool for self-realization or the key to protecting civilization from decadence and collapse. We are just a bunch of folks who for reasons of history and social conditioning have been blessed with a wonderful pursuit. Others may or may not be enticed toward it, but I seriously doubt if E.L. James is the first step toward Shakespeare. Better to start with Romeo and Juliet.

Responding to Parks, Emily Temple calls out a snobbery she sees as unique to literary types:

We don’t have to argue about the fact that trash is a gateway to better tastes in [television, film or music], we just accept that most people discover Ace Ventura before Godard and Top 40 … before Lou Reed and Wagner. And we don’t have to dissect what it means to continue consuming both — there’s much less of a stigma attached to watching The Wire and The Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Inferno II in the same sitting than there is to reading both Silas Marner and The Da Vinci Code. Literary fiction used to be the province of the people, and somehow, over the years, it has become deeply alienating to many would-be readers.

True, there are music snobs, but the world of literature is uniquely snobby, and the art of literature is elevated to a kind of pedestal that no other entertainment-based art form is expected to reach (I’d put performance art and painting in another category) — hence the alienating quality. But it does early readers a disservice to suggest that once a Twilight reader, always and only a Twilight reader. Such snobbery can turn off or intimidate readers, and despite the fact that, as Parks says, literature is not the key to life, it is a pretty good and important thing. So beginning readers of all sorts should be encouraged.

How Zambia Rocks

by Dish Staff

Chris A. Smith navigates the tumultuous political history of post-independence Zambia through the prism of Zamrock, the 1970s psychedelic rock scene that produced bands like The Witch (an acronym for “We Intend to Cause Havoc”), heard above. Smith describes The Witch’s sound as “incendiary, all crystalline guitar lines and supple rhythms, topped by [singer] Jagari’s plaintive voice”:

Zamrock was the energetic sound of a nation that had just thrown off the British colonial yoke. Though Zambia is now one of the poorest countries in the world, at independence it had the second highest GDP on the continent thanks to its copper industry. Zambians expected great things—prosperity, modernization, and equal standing with the West. With its fuzzed-out guitars, propulsive beats, and cosmopolitan outlook, Zamrock provided the soundtrack to this hoped-for future.

That future never arrived. Instead the country was brought low by a series of crises, external and internal, that would render it a ward of the international community by the 1980s. The Zamrock scene, devastated by economic collapse, the AIDS epidemic, and changing musical trends, withered and died.

Last summer, Jagari, once Zambia’s biggest rock star, made his debut concert appearance in North America:

In San Francisco, Jagari opens for the indie beatmaker and DJ Madlib, and the nightclub is packed. Most of the crowd probably doesn’t know who he is, but they go nuts anyway. In response, Jagari turns back the clock. He jumps and screams, flirts and teases, runs in place like Mick Jagger and duckwalks like Chuck Berry. The closer, “October Night”—a song about the band’s 1974 arrest for playing too loud—sprawls into a nine-minute, Latin-infused space jam. He exits the stage, and it feels like a triumph. … He is philosophical about his late resurgence. “I had hoped for this much earlier,” he says. “But that’s the human point of view. God saw it differently. He was grooming me for the challenge.”

(Video: The Witch performs on 1975’s Lazy Bones)

“I was punished because a man had touched me.”

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

College may be experienced almost exclusively by (legal) adults, but the decision if and where to go is, for a traditional-age student, one made while still living at home, often as a minor, with tremendous parental input. And when you fill out that roommate-matching form about your lifestyle, mom, dad, someone is looking over your shoulder, rounding many a freshman up to more straight-edge (is that term still used?) than they are, and still more up to more so than they will be a few weeks into the school-year.

Thus, then, the awkwardness of taking what are, for non-student adults, the guiding lifestyle principles of a religion, and making them, for college students, school rules, or really student rules, to be followed on-campus and off. If an adult voluntarily signs up for four years of chastity, that’s that adult’s business. But if someone does who’s still essentially a kid at the time?

All of this is my longwinded way of preempting the question likely to addressed to Keli Byers, the Brigham Young University student campaigning in Cosmopolitan against the school’s sex ban: Why, if she knew she was “a sexual person” in her mid-teens, did she go to a college where sex isn’t allowed?

Byers, to be clear, doesn’t just object to the ban because rah rah sex. She identifies as a feminist, and sees the sex ban as part of a broader culture of misogyny, which she witnessed even before starting college:

Around [age 15], a guy in his 20s, who had just come home from his Mormon mission, sexually assaulted me. I’d never kissed a boy. It was scary. I told my parents and our bishop, and I was banned from church for a month. I was punished because a man had touched me.

Unfortunately, unless extra measures are taken that somehow prevent this, both puritanical and libertine approaches to sex can end up affirming the status quo, with the former restricting women but staying relatively silent on the behavior of men men, the latter freeing men but not women.

Amanda Hess argues that the puritanical approach is worse, specifically when it comes to reporting rape on campus:

As schools across the country are being criticized for failing to intervene in cases of sexual assault on campus, Byers reminds us that some American students are still contending with what seems like the opposite problem: Their schools aggressively ban all sexual contact, and that approach can be just as damaging to victims, if not more so. In 2009, I wrote about the sex ban at the Catholic University of America, where, in the student code of conduct, consensual sex and sexual assault were outlawed in the same sentence; both masturbation and rape were sins that could trigger disciplinary action.

It’s already… complicated when colleges try to police rape on campus (no room for my thoughts on that in this post), so it’s not surprising that bringing religious laws into the mix complicates matters further.

Hess continues:

Predictably, Catholic’s rule failed to prevent harmless sexual contact among its students. (And today, as Byers notes, students at schools with similar rules have as much access to Tinder as everyone else.) But the policy also created a situation where students were so afraid of running afoul of the chastity rules that they didn’t speak up even in cases of sexual assault. For victims and bystanders, reporting rape meant requiring students to admit that they had engaged in perfectly legal sexual encounters, or had appeared in an opposite-sex dorm against the university’s rules, or had consumed alcohol—all of which was regarded, according to the school code, as just as bad as raping another student.

Indeed. Even if it turns out that there’s less rape at sex-ban-having colleges (let alone sex-and-alcohol-banning), the tremendous challenges facing those who are sexually assaulted at these schools suggest that demanding chastity of 18-22-year-olds, in the smartphone age at that, isn’t what’s going to end campus rape. For some thoughts on what might, see Elizabeth here.